Faces of Portuguese Research: Pedro Leão

Pedro Leão’s Lab was built around an apparent anomaly he noticed in a bacterial genome more than a decade ago: beta-oxidation, a pathway almost every living organism uses to break down fat for energy, was missing from it. That observation, which he chose to follow, has since won him two grants from the European Research Council, among the most competitive funding instruments in Europe, and turned an unglamorous corner of microbiology into a search for new bioactive compounds.

The path that got him there says as much about choices he made outside the lab as about the science itself: staying in Porto instead of building a career abroad, keeping his team deliberately small, and insisting on questions with no obvious application in sight.

A collection worth staying for

Pedro Leão’s own account of how he ended up studying cyanobacteria is unglamorous. He liked microbiology as an undergraduate, tried virology, but preferred bacteria. A master’s project put him in contact with marine cyanobacteria for the first time. Cyanobacteria are usually studied for their toxicity. Leão found himself drawn instead to their chemical ecology: the question of how a microscopic organism manages to communicate, compete, and defend itself using nothing but small molecules.

The choice of where to pursue that interest was shaped mostly by circumstance. Porto had two of the country’s few cyanobacteria specialists at the time, and CIIMAR held a culture collection that has since grown into one of the largest of its kind in the world. For a doctoral student in a country where reagents took weeks to arrive and the literature lagged behind that of colleagues abroad, that collection was a rare asset. “I felt there was a niche there that guaranteed some competitiveness,” Pedro says of the decision. He built his research around a unique resource, instead of trying to compete with better-funded groups on open ground.

Staying anyway

That same instinct, to work with whatever was actually in front of him, runs through the rest of his path. Leão’s academic record stayed almost entirely within one institution, from undergraduate to PhD to his own research group, interrupted only by three separate stays at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and at Harvard. He never did the one thing often treated as a requirement for an independent scientific career: a full, uninterrupted postdoc abroad.

The reason behind it was derived from family circumstances, which kept him anchored to Porto, and he is unusually candid, for a scientist mid-profile, about what it cost him. “I know my career would look completely different if I had done it,” he says, “but it was an inefficiency I chose to take on.” With that experience, Pedro tells his own students, repeatedly, to go abroad, to expose themselves to other ways of thinking about a problem, precisely because he feels the absence of that exposure in his own scientific formation. When they choose to stay anyway, as he did, he says he understands completely.

An idea that had to be his own

By 2017, Pedro Leão held a five-year competitive but temporary FCT Investigator contract. However, he knew a five-year contract is still precarious, because nobody on it knows what comes after. That discomfort pushed him towards an ERC Starting Grant application in his last eligible year.

The idea itself long predated the writing. He had noticed, during his postdoc, that a cyanobacterium he was studying appeared to lack beta-oxidation entirely, and had spent months turning the observation over privately before it became a formal proposal: feed the organism fatty acids it supposedly could not break down, and track whether the chemical signature survived intact into its natural products. He wrote the application in fifteen days, but the idea, he is careful to note, had already been living in his head for much longer. It succeeded on the first attempt, against odds usually below ten percent. “My CV wasn’t particularly remarkable at the time,” he says. “It was the combination of the CV, the reasoning for why I was the right person to do that research, and the project itself.” A second application, years later, landed him on the reserve list instead, a result he mentions without embarrassment, as evidence against the idea that these things get easier once you have already succeeded once.

Knowing his own limits

The grant let him found the Cyanobacterial Natural Products Team in 2018, and with it came a difficult transition: from someone who spent most of his time at the bench to someone who mostly did not. He describes the shift as one of the hardest parts of the job. He never disliked leading people; what he had to accept was that the two roles, bench scientist and team leader, are difficult to articulate.

What he chose to do with that authority says something about his own self-knowledge. Pedro Leão never aimed to build a large laboratory, even as funding accumulated that would have allowed it. “I never had the goal of having a very large laboratory, because I think you lose focus and lose capacity. As I’m not very good at multitasking, I think if I have too many things happening at the same time, I end up getting a bit lost in it,” he says. Inside the lab, the same instinct shows up: he tries never to override a student’s own scientific direction, adjusting ambition up or down where needed but rarely redirecting someone who clearly wants to pursue an idea of their own. It is a version of the same freedom he fought to secure for himself.

Curiosity as a working principle

That same principle shapes how Leão talks about science funding today. He is uneasy with the growing expectation, in Portugal and across the European Union, that research must justify itself through some immediate application. Most competitive funding in Europe, in his account, has become top-down: large consortia, tight deadlines, and an expectation that basic discovery and a market-ready product can be delivered on the same four-year clock. “We have to do, in four years, almost basic research and bring the technology to market,” he says. “That’s absurd. Nobody can do that.” His own defining idea carried none of that pressure. “I had an idea that had nothing to do with applications or products,” he says. “It was an idea that satisfied me, that I thought could be interesting to others, and that I was motivated to investigate.”

It is a conviction he holds even as it works against him. His own path now depends on eventually winning an ERC Advanced Grant, a category where he would compete against researchers a decade or more further along, and he is aware what losing that fight would cost him personally. “I think I would lose some of the joy of doing research,” he says, though he adds, that people in his lab depend on him finding funding regardless, and that he intends to keep going either way. The same loyalty that once kept him in Porto now keeps him showing up for a team he built.

In the end, we now have one of Portugal’s most competitively funded cyanobacteria research programmes, in part because Pedro Leão once noticed a bacterium was missing something every textbook said it should have, and decided to spend years finding out why.